5 Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

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Cisco is reaching out to customers of its failed Umi telepresence venture to let them know it's shutting down the service at the end of January. Cisco is offering full hardware refunds to customers as well as service refunds on prepaid service contracts. Cisco is also offering to recycle product hardware.

That's the right thing to do, but Cisco wouldn't be finding any of this necessary if it had done more research on whether enough customers would be willing to pony up $600 for Umi hardware and pay an ongoing $25 monthly fee for the service. Especially when free alternatives offering a nearly identical user experience were already available.